spectastic

happybday29475

Nice! Smart racing...good lines, timing, and power...I like how just before the finish of the 3's/4's, you cut to a swarm of riders in front of you...like did you win, or get swarmed?

spectastic

I won

carpediemracing 

Heh nice!

mattm

congrats on the win!!

dz_nuzz

Much congrats. That was a good line you pulled in that final chicane.

spectastic

thanks, I only realized afterwards that they leadout guy's entry speed into the corner was a little low. I had wanted to attack in that stretch, but didn't want to repeat my previous mistakes of gunning the corner too fast, especially with moist concrete, so it just kind of happened.

see @mattm, you should include data in your vids. puts a lot of things into perspective.

shovelhd

Congrats! That was textbook execution.

mattm

Actually no - what did the data in your vid provide?

All I watched was an awesome win, didn't look at the data at all.

wktmeow

Didn't get scared before the sprint this time! Still, got caught out in the wind a bit more than I wanted, and then hesitated when I should have jumped hard, but it's improvement.

.be

mattm

nice work! Was Andrew your team mate? I assume so since you stopped sprinting when he went. If he wasn't, that was the wheel to follow. Actually even if he was, that was the wheel to follow. Easier said than done of course..

carpediemracing 

It's good you didn't go with Andrew, else you'd have kept everyone on his wheel. Let the gap open and follow the next rider to surge - follow them super close, you should be looking around as soon as Andrew went past you, looking for a wheel and making sure it's okay to move over to get on that wheel. Solid ride, really good. You were thinking all the time.

Doge

Junior does this sitting on the TT riding thing. Kinda weird. Seems to work. I can't get my head around it.
.be

mattm

Masters nats 35-39 crit.

Pretty boring; the action happens at about 3:45 in.

carpediemracing 

Makes sense if you think about the fastest descent position, which based on Specialized Wind Tunnel is sitting on TT. Add pedaling, a la Sagan, and you have a legit aero pedaling position as long as there's some power available.

There's a guy that used to race around here, got 3rd at Elite Nats RR one year, who would tuck and coast frequently in crits, both in the field and not in the field (i.e off the front solo). I was following him one day and I realized that, okay, at his speeds, tucking and coasting makes sense. For example he would work hard to cross a gap and then coast the last 10 meters of the gap, or he'd do a long coast before a corner in a crit. It was half fooling around, half serious.

FYI he got 3rd at Nat RR by going at 8 miles to go, bridging almost a minute gap to the break solo, latching on at 3 miles to go, got yelled at by the "patron" (a 7-Up pro) to pull, he pulled to the line, kept the field at bay, led out the sprint, and got 3rd out of 5 (7-Up pro pulled out of his shoe so realistically the guy should have gotten 4th). The guy was so strong.

For me it isn't as useful because I'm not going so fast so consistently. If I'm over 35 mph I'll sometimes tuck/coast.

carpediemracing 

oof.

Also, holy strung out. I am not good with strung out fields.

globecanvas

That was extremely not boring. By the last half of the video it seemed like every corner without a crash was a small miracle.

topflightpro

Matt, I've replayed in my head my crash - in the same corner but much earlier in the race - several times. And I am convinced that had I just held my line and cut the turn tight on the left, I would have gotten past the crash unscathed. But because I heard the crash and everyone yelling at me to slow down, crash ahead, I hit the brakes and ended up going down.

And CDR, from what I remember, it was strung out for most, if not all, of the race.

Doge

Barry Wolfe P12 - SoCal crit championship Sunday May 29. I’m posting it because I have it.
No big teams there other than the LUX kids that actually don’t ride together all that much. Daniel being in Europe last week, Brandon in Europe now and a few crash recoveries and typical cycling excuses they had a lot of fun attacking and fooling around, but no real win plans. Had a couple generations of riders from Thurlow to the juniors. Fun classic SoCal crit that we go to very few of anymore. The weather was great.

wktmeow

Thanks! I think it was a combination of being a bit gassed from taking the wind earlier and feeling a little defeated mentally that kept me from going harder there. In retrospect I think I should have been able to scrape out maybe 10-15 more strong pedal strokes and finished in the points, but I guess it didn't seem like it at the time.

This is my 3rd season as a cat 4 and I'm really hoping to finally upgrade this year. It's hard not to get frustrated sometimes, especially since many of my teammates have gone Cat 5 -> Cat 3 in a single season. What I'm realizing now, though, is that I was always a bit nervous of actually contesting the finish before, and as such, I never actually got to practice it much. Maybe something in the order of 4-5 times in the past 3 years. Now that I'm more consistently in the right place in the field when I need, and not just coasting in from the middle of the pack, I can start practicing those finishing moves and develop some better habits.

mattm

Indeed. But isn't every race like that?

Fwiw there were a bunch of crashes in the race (including a big one after mine), so I guess some miracles never came to fruition.

I'd blame it on the cat 3's, but everyone knows cat 1/2's can be sketchy too.

carpediemracing 

I think it's normal to think "Oh, I should have done x, y, z". We forget pain. I know I've kicked myself after races. With the powermeter though I kick myself on the way home, thinking, oh, man, why didn't I just go when they all jumped?! The guy in front of me was in the money and I can beat him regularly. Then I get home, download the data, and see that, oh, I was 8 bpm higher than I've seen all year for the last few minutes and I did multiple 1000+ watt jumps just to stay on wheels so of course I blew up. With data it's easier to be easy on myself (and it's also harder to be easier on myself, if that makes sense.)

If you'd gone with Andrew it would have been an absolutely classic "Me, too!" attack (my term), something I see all the time in the lower categories. One teammate goes. Another, after half a pause, goes also, thinking "Oh, I can help him out" or "Hey, that's a good move!" or something to that effect. Problem is that breaking the elastic to the field is a very tenuous thing. You do not want to be the one that goes half a pause after your buddy goes because you'll just stir everyone up. If you blow your nose, take a swig, stuff like that, then it defuses the situation. With that move, the hesitation of everyone around, the fact that you were at the front, if you'd gone then I bet that Andrew would not have had the gap at the line, and, if people went berserk, he may not have won. I've been on both ends of the equation - my last win was because everyone hesitated behind the guy that let the gap go. The third 3rd place I got later that year a guy rolled off the front and no one responded. He won. I won the field sprint, caught 2 of the 3 guys in the break, but the guy that took off had caught and dropped them, so I wasn't even sprinting for the win. In 2014 I looked around and actually cleared my nose when a teammate went. A guy sort of rolls by me but with no conviction, like "oh, he's blowing his nose, it's probably not a big deal". My teammate won.

topflightpro

Well, there weren't many cat 3s in the race, so it's hard to blame us.

hack

thats because of the cat 2's

dz_nuzz

So P1 races are never sketchy?